Pages

April 4, 2012

Welcome Back...Again

As you may have noticed, I have been very bad at posting lately. I have no good excuse except that this is the final week of the final term of second year university, and I am taking the maximum number of courses my university allows you to take. Tomorrow is the last day of class however, and after that is easter, and after that is all done, I am going to really try to make sure I get something up every day. The thing is that I like to take my time and write a good post. But as I just said in the previous sentence, that takes time, and time is not something I have had a lot of recently. So here is to onwards and upwards, and more frequent posts!

This is a photo from the 6th of March. A few posts ago, I posted a picture from about 20 minutes earlier. In this shot, the sun's light had almost completely gone, and the lights of the city were taking up their duty of lighting up the sky. Through the light clouds you can see a few stars, but the main features are Venus and Jupiter. Of course by now, Jupiter is much lower in the sky than Venus, and drops below the horizon just a short time after the sun sets.

Tonight at the UVic observatory open-house, we will have lots to look at, provided those pesky clouds clear off...The moon is almost full which is a bit annoying as it eats up all the faint objects in the sky because it is so bright. Then there is Jupiter for a little bit, Venus, Mars, Orion's Nebula, an coming up a bit later is Saturn. Pretty soon it will be high enough to get a good look at it, and it will keep getting higher all summer, replacing Jupiter as the best big planet to look at.

This year will be a good one for the observation of Saturn. The last few have not been great because when the planet is in our night sky, the rings were directly edge on to our view. Now though they are not, and they are getting more and more tilted every day. They will be the most tilted to us around 2017.

I will do my best to keep posting regularly, but no guarantees for the next couple weeks.